Maritain: "A technocratic society is but a totalitarian one"

“THE preface to Fascism and Nazism is a thorough disregard of the spiritual dignity of man, and the assumption that merely material or biological standards rule human life and morality. Thereafter, since man cannot do without some loving adoration, the monstrous adoration of the totalitarian Leviathan will have its day. Technology is good, as a means for the human spirit and for human ends. But technocracy, that is to say, technology so understood and so worshiped as to exclude any superior wisdom and any other understanding than that of calculable phenomena, leaves in human life nothing but relationships of force, or at best those of pleasure, and necessarily ends up in a philosophy of domination. A technocratic society is but a totalitarian one. But a technological society may be democratic, provided this society is quickened by an inspiration which is supra-technological, and if it recognizes, with Bergson, that “the body, now larger, calls for a bigger soul,” and that “the mechanical” summons up the “mystical.” ” 

~Jacques Maritain: Education at the Crossroads.

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